president

No, this is not about fact-checking the current president’s tweets, though they are often false. This is about how people can fake tweets from his twitter and other people fall for it (so many people, including some of my Facebook friends).

This particular tweet went viral earlier this week, and it’s not real.

How do we know it’s fake? It looks like a real tweet, right? Well, there’s its ridiculousness and misspelling, but that can be believable nowadays. But you can also easily fact check if a Trump tweet is genuine. First you can use Twitter’s own Advanced Search. You can use it to search words or phrases or all tweets on particular dates by a particular person. It’s very handy. But with Trump in particular, you can also search on the Trump Twitter Archive website, which has a handy search function.

There’s no need to just guess at whether a tweet you see is genuine–there are ways to do the research before you spread misinformation–or you can spread it as long as you make clear you know it’s fake and a joke.